I hated talking on the phone, and really the only people who called me were my parents (and spammers). So they went to voicemail. Constantly. After years of having a mother who would, on some occasions, call me upwards of four times a day, I had finally tried to set a few boundaries. Then I let them grow taller and taller. When I resolved to stop answering so many phone calls, I couldn’t tell if their need was increasing or if my desire for freedom and self-determination was growing, or both.
Instead, I saved almost every voicemail my parents have left me since 2016. I’ve left most of them unheard. I would let them fill up my inbox until they couldn’t leave any more messages. And eventually, I would have to siphon them out of my phone onto an external drive, saved with their date and time.
Transferring them was a simple but unnecessarily long process for me, a ritual of grief and self-hatred begun many years before I started the archiving project. I felt so horrible about putting space between my parents and I, about letting the space get larger as their needs grew. Not answering the phone every time had been one of my first and more decisive steps in trying to learn how to separate myself, but I still retained the evidence of the distance it created. I could measure the space between us in the gaps on the call log.
Almost everyone else in my life tends to think of the archiving as healing, and I’m mildly convinced due to their assuredness. But there is something about reliving all the pain I thought I had packed away neatly that, I must say, feels quite contradictory to that claim. That, and my pattern of creating internal emotional turmoil as self-punishment.
Is it more healing to keep these voicemails, or to delete them unheard? Is it more harmful or healing to imagine the changes in my parents’ voices and words as the years moved on, not knowing if I’ll ever be strong enough to listen to them? Was it more harmful or healing to move away, to let myself be an adult, to abandon my parents when they needed me most, to let their voicemails pile up and have to scrape them out of the guts of my phone?
The sin of avoidance; a ritual of atonement.